Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This Government is very good at spin. There is spin about a recovery and job creation, in addition to spin about the likes of the Taoiseach and his friend Frank Flannery sharing the pain of working people. Not a Deputy or Senator is unaware of how empty all that old guff about recovery is, when we see people from our own areas every day who are suffering due to this Government's policies. People are frantic with worry and stress. Many have experienced tragic circumstances because of the impossibility of adequately supporting their families in this State due to the Government's continuous austerity policies.

This Gateway outrage is more of it. Gateway forces unemployed people to carry out work for local authorities through the threat of cuts and suspensions to welfare payments. It is a cheap, exploitative scheme which will then be presented to the people as a job creation exercise because it massages the live register figures. In fact, it is punitive and takes advantage of people by forcing them into slave labour for local authorities which, of course, need workers but cannot employ them due to the recruitment embargo. Surely it must breach the most basic principles of labour law and the international convention on forced labour. Has the Minister ever thought this through? What will it do to the morale of local authority workers to be working alongside people who are forced to do the job for €20 per week?

The Taoiseach and Tánaiste smiled for the cameras with Angela Merkel last week. They were like three cats that got the cream on the steps of Government Buildings. Back slapping and self-congratulation was the order of the day. The founders of the Labour Party must be somersaulting in their graves.

However, there is another aspect to the suffering being meted out by Fine Gael and Labour. They are not just visiting this burden on the working people of today, but arranging it so that future generations too will look back on this Fine Gael-Labour Government as the one which rolled back the hard-won gains of the trade union movement down through the decades.

God be with the days when the Labour Party stood up to the bosses and the Government to defend working people against this kind of exploitation. If this was not being forced upon people, what union, shop steward or shop-floor worker would accept it? How can Labour Party members tolerate support for a scheme which forces people into 22 months of hard labour for a welfare top-up of €20 that can be eroded by tax? It does not include training, does not feature education and does not make it easier for anyone to get a job afterwards. It is a product of the ideological rot that has set into the Labour Party, suggesting that the unemployed are the problem in our economy and not unemployment, which is made worse by the Government's own austerity policies. It is dehumanising people who have lost their jobs and punishing them by making them slaves. The plan is to employ up to 80 people on this scheme in Kerry. What choice will they have when the Minister is threatening to cut their social welfare if they do not enter into this work-for-benefits scheme?

There are two important facts to note in this regard. First, when this Government took office 55.1% of the unemployed were unfortunately long-term. Now, after three years of this Fine Gael-Labour coalition, 61.4% of those without work are long-term unemployed. Second, there has been a 25% reduction in local authority workers since 2011. In view of this, local authorities are struggling to provide the most basic services or even deal with the emergency situation caused by the recent savage storms.

I call on the Government not to go ahead with this scheme. It should stop it now and instead look for the alternatives in activation schemes, centred on a training-based community employment scheme. Such a scheme should, by right, be non-exploitative and based on what I believed was a rock-solid principle of the trade union movement and the Labour Party - equal pay for equal work.

I am calling on Labour Party Deputies to prove me wrong when I say that if they go along with this, they can no longer claim to be a Labour Party. They will well and truly have crossed the ideological line and joined Fine Gael as a party of the right, which has no conscience about shamelessly exploiting workers. I call on all Deputies to support this motion and protect workers' rights that have been fought for long and hard.

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